


Towards the Null and Void

by vogue91



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 07:12:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13002564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vogue91/pseuds/vogue91
Summary: Draco can't escape. The only thing he can do, is to keep aimlessly walking.





	Towards the Null and Void

One step. One more. One more. Another one.

Steps.

Steps that echoed, devious, in that room too big and too empty.

Marble was too thick under his shoes, uselessly elegant.

They made an almost deafening sound.

It was Christmas holidays; and even though the fireplaces were crackling in almost every room, Draco felt impossibly cold. His thought ran briefly to the cellar, where there was someone who certainly felt colder than him, but he pushed that idea away fast, because he wasn’t able to stand it.

His mind was already filled with pictures he would’ve never want to see, it couldn’t allow itself the luxury of creating new ones.

He felt tired. At the end of the line.

When last year he had accepted to receive the Mark, he had felt proud of himself; it would’ve meant power, deference, reaching a higher level than those who surrounded him.

Delusional.

He looked out the window, intent.

It was windy, like it had been for a week now. And Draco disliked wind; he didn’t like the way it seemed to create chaos, he didn’t like it because it always caused a sharp pain in his head, he didn’t like it cause it annoyed him when he tried to get some sleep. But even less he liked the wind that was raging these days; it had something deeply unnatural in it, like it was no mere atmospheric agent, but a reflection of the confusion reigning on the Wizarding World right now.

The same confusion reigning on everybody’s mind, included his.

He thought about his last nightmare.

_Darkness. Screams. Blood. Death._

He woke up drenched, glad he was able to open his eyes, before remembering that everything he dreamt of was in his mind because it had actually happened.

He started walking in circle throughout his bedroom, like he was doing now.

It eased him, in a way. He concentrated on the inconsistent patterns of the marble under his feet, on that deaf sound his steps made.

On everything, but the demons haunting him.

He had seen people brought to his home, thrown in the cellar and never coming back. At times, _he_ came, stayed for a few minutes and then left again.

Draco locked himself up in his room like a child, and he started walking.

Back, forth. In concentric circles, getting smaller and smaller.

He felt sick under the weight of his own cowardice, the Malfoy’s heirloom, but he couldn’t live without it.

What was he doing?

The Mark never ceased to burn, and even if he could he wouldn’t be able to forget so easily the path he had chosen.

That’s why, he walked.

Restless.

There were people going toward the horizon, looking for a new road to walk, trying to find a sense in their existence, or trying to fleet a reality become too hard to be endured.

Draco was denied the horizon, he wasn’t allowed to stray from the path paved for him, and that’s why he could just look for himself inside that room, undertaking a circular path, without a goal nor a purpose, if not that to shut up the screams in his head.

So, he walked. Step by step, a look out the window, a look to the trees surrounding his house, shaken by that wind that got more and more artificial.

A step, a blow. A nightmare, a sharp pain in his stomach.

A road he couldn’t follow, a road he had given up on, a salvation that grew more and more afar.

He stopped, hearing noises downstairs. He closed his eyes, and he couldn’t stop his imagination from wandering.

Other sacrificial victims, in that massacre game the Dark Lord was the God of, not the demon he actually was.

Draco sighed, trying to focus his hearing only on the blowing of the wind, that was raging more violent that before.

There was no path to take, and he could but await his return to Hogwarts. A few days; his nightmares wouldn’t have come to an end but, at least, he wasn’t going to forge new ones.

Only the wind would’ve kept following him wherever he went.

There was no escape.


End file.
